“Easily.”
“It would feed seventeen just as easily, you know. I wish you would come.”
“I’d only be in the way.”
“That’s ridiculous. You know everybody, you like them all, they like you—”
“It’s all people your own age, Andrea. And tonight’s all my favorite programs.”
“I think Mark would like to change places with you. He’s got a thing for Mary Tyler Moore. You won’t change your mind?”
“Thank you, but I won’t. It’s enough satisfaction for me helping you get things ready.” She lowered her eyes. “A couple of years ago—”
“I know, Mother.”
“I felt terribly helpless, you know. I wanted to be able to comfort you in some way and I didn’t know how.”
“I had to work things out for myself.”
“Yes, I realize that. Andrea? You’re happy with how things worked out, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am.”
“You’re very fortunate, you know. You do know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
The preparations for the party had not been difficult. With her mother’s help, Andrea was able to do most of the cooking in advance. That afternoon Robin went bowling with a girl friend at whose house she would have dinner and spend the night. Andrea was dressed and ready by the time Mark was peeling lemons and setting up the bar. The invitations had been for six-thirty, and at six-thirty Roger and Eileen Fradin were the first to arrive. “I know we’re early,” Eileen said, “but my sitter was early for a change and I hate hanging around the house once the sitter’s there. It makes them twitchy.”
The Fradins were followed within a few minutes by Jeff’s sister Linda and her husband Arnie Polakoff, and then the rest of the guests came in a steady stream, with the Drozdowskis completing the party at five minutes of seven. The group had drinks in the living room, then moved to the dining room at seven-thirty. They filled their own plates from serving dishes on the sideboard and sat around the dining table, which was just large enough with the extra leaves to accommodate all sixteen of them. The wine went around, and Cass got to his feet and tapped his fork against his wineglass.
“A toast,” he said. “To Andrea and Mark, who in the course of ten wonderful years—”
“Twelve,” his wife said.
“In the course of ten wonderful years—”
“Twelve!”
He turned and stared loftily down at her. He was really losing his hair rapidly, Andrea noted, and for the first time in his life he was putting on weight, but if anything these elements of aging added to his presence. “I said ten wonderful years,” he said. “Ten out of twelve is a damned good average, honey.”
There was just the slightest pause before everyone laughed. “To Andrea and Mark,” Cass went on, “who have served as an inspiration to us all. May you have many more and may we celebrate them with you. God bless.”
Everyone took a sip of wine.
At one point in the evening, after they had all returned to the living room, Andrea tried to imagine the room as it might look filled with the ninety people on her original list. Then she began glancing around the room, peopling it with other persons from her life who had not been invited. She seated John Riordan on the sofa next to Eileen Fradin. Calvin Burleigh she posed in the doorway, leaning against the jamb with one foot crossed in front of the other and talking earnestly to Jerry Singer. She brought Jeff Gould back east and let him stand near the fireplace glaring across the room at his ex-wife and her husband for six months. And Winkie, and other friends from Bryn Mawr, and the people she had known in New York. And her father.
And Mark’s parents, who lived year-round in Florida now.
For a moment she could almost sense those alien presences in her living room. Then she took a deep breath and willed them away and made a show of paying attention to what Terri Santora was saying to her.
Sometimes these days it was hard for her to believe that she had ever left. For almost four months she had lived in New York in an apartment that would have fitted quite comfortably into her living room in Tonawanda and would not have more than half-filled the living room of the Lebrun house. For almost four months she had worked from nine to five at the bookstore on Fifth Avenue, shuttling to and from work on airless subway trains. For all that time she had kept coming into contact with new people who darted furiously in and out of her life, until the day when she packed her suitcase and took her life onto a plane and away from all of them.
It was never difficult for her to remember those months. They were etched upon her memory in sharp relief, and she could recall them more clearly and in more precise detail than more recent stretches of time. The months she had spent in New York served as a boundary in her life, a line of demarcation, with everything else to be placed either before or after that line.
And yet, as vivid as they were in memory, they seemed at the same time quite unreal. As if they had happened to someone else, or as if they had happened to her in some parallel universe, some series of desperately real interlocking dreams, utterly involving and lifelike while you dreamed them but gone forever when the alarm clock woke you.
Occasionally she thought that she might like to discuss the months in New York with Mark, but more often she was grateful that he never brought up the subject. Nor did her mother, or her other Buffalo friends and relatives. There was evidently a tacit agreement that her deviation from normal behavior was to be carefully overlooked, and this approach spared her any number of unpleasant conversations while depriving her of the opportunity of using her friends as sounding boards to put what she had gone through into perspective for herself.
Just recently she had finally brought up the subject herself with Eileen Fradin. She had begun by trying to explain how her memory of that time was at once clear and unreal.
“I think I can understand that,” Eileen had said. “It stands out in your memory because it was so different from your life in Buffalo. You were working, you were meeting people, you were involved in something new every day. Around here, let’s face it, it’s hard to remember whether something happened last year or the year before because the years are pretty much alike, aren’t they? You have to try to tie the events to something, like did Jason chip his tooth before or after we got the new washing machine.”
“Then why does it seem as though it happened in a dream?”
“Because it did.”
“Huh?”
“Well, not in a dream, but like a dream, because it happened to somebody else. That wasn’t you in New York.”
“Who do you think it was, then? The winner of the Andrea Benstock look-alike contest?”
“Oh, I don’t know what I mean. Sometimes I say things that don’t mean anything.”
“Hey, come on, Eileen. Don’t play dumb with me. I want to know what you meant.”
“Oh, I don’t know. But if I moved to New York it wouldn’t really be me. Because the person I am lives in a certain house with certain other people and shops at this market and drives that car and has these friends, in other words lives a certain kind of life, and if you took me out of that life I wouldn’t be me, I’d be some other person entirely.”
“In other words I’m Mark’s wife and Robin’s mother and Sylvia Kleinman’s daughter.”
“And my friend, and a lot of people’s friend.”
“And that’s what a person is. The other people in her life and where she goes and what she does.”
“Did I say something wrong, Andrea?”
“No, of course not. No, I just — oh, it’s so strange. I met a lot of people in New York but I only had one friend.”